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VMware will acquire SpringSource for approximately $362 million in cash and equity plus the assumption of approximately $58 million of unvested stock and options. The acquisition has been approved by SpringSource's stockholders and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2009, subject to customary closing conditions.
SpringSource is the innovator and driving force behind some of the most popular and fastest growing open source developer communities, application frameworks, runtimes, and management tools. In just five years, SpringSource has established a presence in a majority of the Global 2000 companies, and is rapidly delivering a new generation of commercial products and services. VMware plans to continue to support the principles that have made SpringSource solutions popular: the interoperability of SpringSource software with a wide variety of middleware software, and the open source model that is important to the developer community.
Together, VMware and SpringSource plan to further innovate and develop integrated Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions that can be hosted at customer datacenters or at cloud service providers. These solutions will allow customers to rapidly build new enterprise and web applications and run and manage these applications in the same dynamic, scalable and cost-efficient vSphere-based internal or external clouds that can also host and manage their existing applications, providing an evolutionary path to the future. Forrester Research expects the emerging and rapidly growing PaaS market to expand to $15B by 2016.
http://www.springsource.com

VMware will acquire SpringSource for approximately $362 million in cash and equity plus the assumption of approximately $58 million of unvested stock and options. The acquisition has been approved by SpringSource's stockholders and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2009, subject to customary closing conditions.

SpringSource is the innovator and driving force behind some of the most popular and fastest growing open source developer communities, application frameworks, runtimes, and management tools. In just five years, SpringSource has established a presence in a majority of the Global 2000 companies, and is rapidly delivering a new generation of commercial products and services. VMware plans to continue to support the principles that have made SpringSource solutions popular: the interoperability of SpringSource software with a wide variety of middleware software, and the open source model that is important to the developer community.

Together, VMware and SpringSource plan to further innovate and develop integrated Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions that can be hosted at customer datacenters or at cloud service providers. These solutions will allow customers to rapidly build new enterprise and web applications and run and manage these applications in the same dynamic, scalable and cost-efficient vSphere-based internal or external clouds that can also host and manage their existing applications, providing an evolutionary path to the future. Forrester Research expects the emerging and rapidly growing PaaS market to expand to $15B by 2016.

Indeed, maybe one step on the road where Bill and Rod will finally get along.
A road towards a destination where Rod accepts that Spring is (just) another platform next to the likes of Java EE and .NET, instead of trying to be the replacement for Java with the sole argument that the standard parts of Java (JSF, JPA, EJB3, etc) are supposedly so bad that developers need to be saved from it by the benevolent Spring.
Don't get me wrong. Spring is a pretty solid framework, but so are Java EE and .NET. I love using Spring, but the endless senseless bashing of Java EE by Rod really puts me off and gives Spring as a company a somewhat immature image (IMHO).
captcha: "impossible praise" (is that a coincidence or not? :P)

but the endless senseless bashing of Java EE by Rod really puts me off and gives Spring as a company a somewhat immature image (IMHO).....

+1
Earlier in the day I had commented on Rod's blog post on VMware acquisition, that they would finally move away from their childish wars with JBoss.
To be fair, JBoss has its share of Childishness too. I sometimes can't believe, that these folks created great frameworks, that were influential in making up what Java EE today.
If they just completely stop, kiss and make up, that would be so much better for the Java community :-)

but the endless senseless bashing of Java EE by Rod really puts me off and gives Spring as a company a somewhat immature image (IMHO).....

+1

Earlier in the day I had commented on Rod's blog post on VMware acquisition, that they would finally move away from their childish wars with JBoss.

To be fair, JBoss has its share of Childishness too. I sometimes can't believe, that these folks created great frameworks, that were influential in making up what Java EE today.

If they just completely stop, kiss and make up, that would be so much better for the Java community :-)

A lot of the "childness" comes from stress. You pour your life into something wondering if it is going to pan out. Any criticism, however minute or harmless, adds to the stress. And when it does pan out, you breath a huge sigh of relief and start to relax.
BTW, my CAPTCHA was "championship"

Congrats to everyone at SpringSource. This is a big deal for them, and I hope they have a kick arse party to celebrate.
VMWare is really on a tare. The Google AJAX API team is now there (and they are kick arse guys), and now this.
Just need to buy EngineYard to get the JRuby guys and they are set to rule the world ;)
Cheers,
Dion
.. wow, haven't commented on TSS for so long! ..

Rock on SpringSource! I'm excited for what this means for the company and for the future! It's hard to believe what has happened in a few short years since the Wrox book(s). I can't wait to see what's next!
Congratulations!

Congratulations to the team, that's a very impressive achievement! That's also a great news for the ex- G2One and Hyperic teams.
And an additional step in the grand OS-Middleware consolidation currently going on.
Onward,
Sacha

I'm looking our for my company PushToTest when I say this: I hope SpringSource revenue was very low to show a good multiplier for an Open Source Software (OSS) business. The multiplier is a key factor in determining a successful OSS company. VCs want a 10x multiplier. Put $10 million in and get $100 million out. It is my sincere hope that SpringSource revenue was less than $30 Million (annual run rate.) Matt Asay's blog seems to think the number was just above $20 Million in mixed license/services revenue. That would put the valuation at 10 times.
Where should Open Source Software (OSS) companies look for a valuation model? I'm hoping the SpringSource valuation tells the investor community that a 10-times valuation is reasonable for a company with a license/service revenue mix.
I interviewed Rod Johnson and Javier Soltero in May 2009. Here is what I wrote at the time:
Reducing the time it takes a Java developer to build an application is valuable to organizations. SpringSource is betting that making management of the resulting Spring-based application easier will unlock huge new benefits to organizations. This is the reasoning behind the SpringSource Hyperic merger.
I had a chance to speak with Rod Johnson (CEO) and Javier Soltero (CTO of Management Products) of SpringSource. Johnson and Soltero make a happy pair. They even finished each other’s sentences at times. This seems to be a continuation of their earlier technology partnerships. For example, Spring Enterprise comes with Hyperic HQ. Spring uses AspectJ technology to transparently instrument enterprise applications.
I have a business interest in understanding Spring’s management technology for Java enterprise applications. PushToTest built a monitoring API that reads performance metrics from Glassbox (http://www.glassbox.com). Glassbox integration comes in TestMaker 5.3 and provides correlation for root cause analysis and mitigation. PushToTest designed its monitoring API (PTTMonitor) to read other performance monitoring systems through the same JMX interface that Spring uses to publish performance metric. Look for an announcement from PushToTest shortly!
Spring-based applications are automatically instrumented for monitoring and management. Hyperic then monitors internal operations and presents the data as a set of dashboards, consoles, and reports.
On the face of it the merger makes business sense too. Johnson told me owning an open source business is nothing different from anything else: “Pre-revenue requires hand waving. Hyperic had million dollar revenue streams and a definable growth rate.”
Johnson said SpringSource aims to achieve $1 Billion in sales and make its IPO in 18 months. That would certainly make SpringSource’s venture capitalists (Benchmark and Excel) happy.
Soltero gave some details on the upcoming product roadmap for the combined companies. Cloud management announcements are coming down the track. They are getting rid of JBoss and will do new development based on Spring. Hyperic Sigar (http://www.hyperic.com/products/sigar.html) low level parts are going into other parts of Spring.
SpringSource’s reach into management may extend beyond Java enterprise applications. Johnson told me SpringSource contributes to the Apache group httpd server.
Johnson told me the black box nature of PHP and Ruby on Rails improves developer productivity but lacks the visibility into the internals to make it manageable. Java has JMX, .NET has Perflib and CLR application management. Java and .NET have a centralized management model that you can plug into, including performance counters, service and statement management. Johnson said, “With SpringSource we can make JMX and related capabilities leveraged past the ISVs.”
-Frank

The companies that make the headlines when they sell always seem to have huge valuations. However, when it comes to a regular business (software or otherwise) that doesn't have the excitement around it like JBoss and SpringSource, it seems to me that more realistic valuations are in order.
My favorite, I think, is the simple "return on investment" valuation, where you look at a company's profit and decide how much of a return on your investment you hope to get. The deals that make the headlines always involve some big "strategic" objective, which seems to account for their high valuations. I've never understood eBay's valuation for Skype or Google's valuation for YouTube, but people smarter than me were involved there.
As a investor/buyer, you could invest your money in Treasury bills or in a mutual fund and perhaps get some small ROI percentage.
However, if you're buying a risky thing like a software business, you'd want a higher return. Let's say 25%/yr over 5 years. Suppose the software company you're looking at buying made $100 in profit in each of the last three years. If I buy your software company for $163.84 and hope to profit $100/yr for 5 years, then I would turn a 25% profit (ROI) over 5 years. (Assuming I did my math right.)
The haggling comes in over the expected ROI (25% too high? Should be more like 15%?) and the expected profit (you're not likely to keep making $100 profit per year? More? Less?).
This is just my simple way of thinking about valuations.
-David
Flux - Java Job Scheduler. File Transfer. Workflow.
http://www.fluxcorp.com

Congratulations of course for getting that amount for (re-) selling their framework along with the recent acquisitions to the Spring Source management.
Yet, I honestly wonder what the business value is for VMWare. Spring essentially is all open source. So what do they gain? Spring Source's revenue is probably rather low compared to the sales tag.
They gain control about further development of Spring of course, making it easier to make it fit with the VMWare infrastructure. And they'll buy some good people of course, but them staying is not set in stone either.

Similar to the Oracle/Sun deal the buyers are interested primarily in marked-share and mind-share, not in technology (if there is any Spring technology at all beyond the hypes). The Spring conglomeration of frameworks will quickly degenerate when the startup-driven permanent hypes are gone.

Similar to the Oracle/Sun deal the buyers are interested primarily in marked-share and mind-share, not in technology (if there is any Spring technology at all beyond the hypes). The Spring conglomeration of frameworks will quickly degenerate when the startup-driven permanent hypes are gone.

Not so sure about Oracle/Sun. With Sun I would see some expertise in for Oracle that they simply do not possess and can not acquire quickly. In particular they get a very good operating system and hardware /storage system supplier. That can open up interesting business routes, like those IBM can offer.
I doubt that there is much in the deal re Java since Oracle is pretty much covered with the recent BEA acquisition anyway.

My 'guess' would be because larger and to some extent smaller, software companies are trying to produce/get their product stacks that run in virtual environments (i.e. those managed by VMWare), and having something like Spring (dmServer for example) gives them that instead of relying/waiting/waiting/waiting on those external companies to do it.
Its no different IMHO than any other acquisition for the most part, VMWare probably just wants to be able to provide a complete solution. They have management and the runtime now.

True, but the entire tech sector (with the exception of the big 4 legacy software companies) has been given a bye by (gotta love the intricacies of American English) Wall Street, until the new "irrational exuberance" phase starts in late 2010, early 2011. These things DO HAPPEN in cycles, you know :-)
Anyway, the visionaries at VMware are pretty Yogi (i.e. "smarter than your average bear"), but I don't think they can muster enough cheedar to play in the "Poker Match of the Decade". The one where the winner gets Salesforce.com :-)
The big money is in applications/games, not the technology used to create them.

Well done guys! You deserve it after all the hard work you went through. I remember the first days of the interface21 framework which was not Spring yet 6 years ago, just some code to accompany the Wrox book. I wish you all the best for the future, it looks quite bright from here! :)
Yann

virtualization approach gives a fairly isolated environment for applications to follow its own architecture. It could follow a fixed (stateless) architecture with its PaaS offering when it comes to patterns such as "Burst Compute". This way most of the JEE applications could be migrated to cloud and will take java developers into the cloud computing mainstream.
http://manidoraisamy.blogspot.com/2009/08/spring-takes-jee-into-cloud-computing.html

Congratulations Rod!
I have to say I did a double take when I read the title,
as the reason why didn't immediately spring to mind (No pun intended), but then I realised that VmWare will be able to compete with Google App Engine and Amazon. Very astute play.
Paul
-------------------------------------
Paul Parsons
CTO & Chief Architect
The Server Labs
http://www.theserverlabs.comhttp://blog.theserverlabs.com

This is well known market observation: Oracle hates VMware, VMware has been attacking Oracle for some time now.
Taking into account how many BEA people went into VMware after BEA-Oracle aquisition, the SpringSource aquisition directly affects the Oracle middleware positions.
Just imagine - the combination of engineering experience (VMware's low level hypervisor technology and Spring's Java application server expertise). Also the combination of love/respect: VMware's among the admin folks, SpringSource's among the developers. Not to mention, VMware is very strong, enterprise player and still (despite their size) quite agile...
IMHO Oracle should (re)focus and speed up their work on virtualized JVM technology, i.e. the JRockit JVM running without the operating system on top of hypervisor. The idea they once had with Virtual Edition of WebLogic app server.
I can bet, the ex-BEA folks at VMware are cooking up something similar - virtualized Spring application server running without OS. With the expertise of BEA, VMware and Spring guys (and level of hate emotions between VMware and Oracle), this is realistic.
For VMware the next obvious target is a company with application clustering technology for the (soon-to-be-virtualized) Spring app server - like Terracotta (another company hating Oracle, so at VMware they would be in a good company) or GemStone. This would be another hit against Oracle (and their Coherence grid technology - peace Cameron).
Adrian
PS
I also understand better now why Rod has been so harsh about Oracle for the last year or so...

Wow. This is a surprise. Not that SpringSource is a good acquisition, but both the amount of money and the buyer are surprising. I wonder how does this really fit with VMware? I would've expected an IBM or RedHat to make the move.
Cheers,
E. Conde
Lead Developer
jBilling - Open Source Billing

Wow. This is a surprise. Not that SpringSource is a good acquisition, but both the amount of money and the buyer are surprising. I wonder how does this really fit with VMware? I would've expected an IBM or RedHat to make the move.

+1
Congratulations to the SpringSource and (former) Hyperic Teams. How long will it take until the big players IBM and Oracle are trying to buy into VMware's technology and customer base?
Cheers, Armin
SOPERA GmbH

As much as I'm impressed with SpringSource's product line, the price VMWare paid is simply mindboggling!
Rod has always had a keen vision of how software should be put together and his vision shows in the company's acquisitions. That is, Covalent, Hyperic and G2One. However, if you really think about it, none of these company's built anything that was rocket science. However, they built stuff that developers easily recognized their usefulness.
Build stuff quickly (G2One), build stuff that's configurable (Spring), Build stuff that's manageable (Hyperic), Build stuff on a tried and true engine (Covalent). It's a nice coherent application stack that apparently VMWare felt it needed to pursue its strategy.
Now again, was it worth $400m, not possibly SpringSources' potential revenue but maybe for all the intangibles.

This is indeed a surprise move from VMWare but business strategy makes sense -
The acquisition of the commercial open-source middleware/framework company makes perfect sense. First make your Virtualization highly resilient, portable then partner with Networking giants for Virtualization Aware Networking, and then jump into software market.
SpringSource gives VMWare a development “platform,” the next step, to deliver in VMWare-based cloud services and a unique Ecosystem to define both application construction and deployment architectures. read more - http://www.taranfx.com/blog/?p=1593

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